fghorow an hour ago

'Once in 300 years'???

While the functional form of the statistical distributions themselves might still be valid, certainly the old parameters are no longer so.

andrewstuart 2 hours ago

The entire thesis of once in 300 years or once in 1000 years or once in 100 years weather event really has to be let go by the media. The fact is these things are happening or more and more often and are a direct result of climate change and then not once in 300 years, they’re happening all the time

  • georgefrowny an hour ago

    It's also a bad statistical method because if there are 300 cities/regions in the world and a storm hits a random one of them most severely each time, on average you will expect to have one city/region every year seeing a 300-year storm even in a static climate.

    Not that I think the climate isn't changing, but because if the headlines are obviously p-hacking all the time you get all climate change reporting eventually called fake news even when it isn't.

  • griffzhowl an hour ago

    The article says it's the heaviest rainfall recorded in Hat Yai over the last 300 years. So that's the actual meaning, and interpreting it in the probabilistic sense seems to have been the initiative of the headline writer.

  • roughly 2 hours ago

    I mean, we’re still working on convincing people that climate change is actually happening, so if they want to keep reporting the 100yr storms that happen every year now, that’s fine by me.

    • ragebol an hour ago

      They should be clearer: "storms that were once in a 100 years in the 'old' climate".

      But how do you fit in nuance and statistics into news headlines etc?

      • grebc 38 minutes ago

        English has good words for severity which is what they’re trying to impart.

  • senectus1 an hour ago

    yeah they should measure rainfall in swimming pools, or sydney harbours.